6. Ṣwa`ǝkuka

A prayer for the Sabbath morning, including the Seventh Sabbath, with a section in Ge’ez and ‘Agawegna, in alternation. It opens: “I called out to You.” God is the only one and those who pray assert that God should not forget them. The prayer ends by recalling some of God’s attributes.

The structure of this unmeasured piece follows the hemiola pattern. The two constituent parts of the verse – A and B – are organized in the following binary form: A-A-B/A-A-B. Although the melody is in the pentatonic anhemitonic scale, the intonation of some degrees is unstable, a phenomenon characteristic of music based on this scale whose smallest interval is a full tone. As in various other African musical repertoires, in the Beta Israel liturgy the contour of the melody prevails over the exact intonation of the intervals.